I’ve been playing around with mobile sensors recently and one such experiment is the voice choir.

Here’s how it works.

  1. I’m the presenter. I visit voice choir, create a room, and show the QR code.
  2. People see the QR code (via screen-sharing or projector) and open on their mobile phones to join my room.
  3. I press “Start”. They hear a tone and they should hum at the same pitch.
  4. They can see if their pitch is above or below and adjust. I get a data stream of their pitch.
  5. Over time, we see if we can hum at the same pitch, or how close we converge.
  6. I record this as a visualization.

We played this in Straive across about 20 people who joined the room. Here’s the video:

What surprised me most was how little convergence there was even after 45 seconds. People were still humming all over the place.

In the early days of Gramener, I learned that there are some people who find it hard to pick up a “design” sense. Even after repeated guidance, I found them violating rules like keeping edges aligned. Research also suggests that some people find it hard to pick up mathematics - and that the population may be bi-modal (i.e. some people get it, some just don’t.)

Maybe this true for music as well?

I think it’s cool that we can test this: get 100 students into this room, have them hum a tone, and see if the alignment / convergence is bimodal!